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Weep Not for Thad Cochran

“All politics is local,” former House speaker Tip O’Neill observed. The GOP primary in Mississippi pitting long-serving incumbent Thad Cochran against a Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel—which ended in a photo finish Tuesday night, prompting a runoff in a few weeks—is a case in point. Contests have contexts. Treating this one as a mere case of a moderate conservative establishment figure against a radical conservative insurgent runs the risk of emphasizing nationwide ideology too much, while neglecting regional political culture.

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History may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain observed, it rhymes. In the American South, the national conflict between establishment conservatives and Tea Party insurgents rhymes with clashes in Dixie’s past between populist outsiders and the representatives of the old upper-class “Bourbons” (the nickname was inspired not by the whiskey, but by the similarity between the reactionary politics and sense of entitlement of the South’s elite families and a certain French dynasty).

The big business wing of the Republican Party everywhere in the United States may feel uncomfortable with the Tea Party radicals willing to protest the Affordable Care Act by shutting down the federal government, at the risk of America’s credit rating. But business leaders in the South should not be mistaken for moderate, old-school Northeastern “Rockefeller Republicans.” Many of them are today’s equivalents of what the Alabama populist Big Jim Folsom in the 1920s called “the Big Mules”—the wealthy industrialists and utility owners who united with big cotton and timber plantation owners to dominate the politics of Alabama and other Southern states during generations of Democratic control.

Then as now, white Southern populists frozen out of the power structure have been attracted to other parties, including the post-Civil War Republicans, the Populists and even, before World War I, the Socialists, or they have rallied behind charismatic anti-establishment candidates in the region’s dominant party—the Democrats before the Civil Rights Revolution, the Republicans today.

Whether they choose to work inside the party system or outside of it, populists everywhere are drawn to movements that treat them as at once the victims of mythological conspiracies and as fairy-tale heroes from humble backgrounds who will redeem a corrupt society. In the South, the universal themes of little-guy populism have been blended with white racial entitlement and the Southern strain of evangelical Protestantism. The results have often defied characterization as “left and right,” in the case of pro-New Deal prohibitionists or Southern supporters of the post-War I Second Ku Klux Klan, who favored many progressive reforms along with white supremacy and anti-Catholicism.

Working-class white populism has always been the greatest potential threat to the power of the Southern oligarchs. They have responded over the last century by the complementary methods of disfranchisement and cooptation of non-elite whites.

In the early 1900s, the Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests and other devices to shrink Southern electorates until the Civil Rights Revolution half a century later. Many forget that the victims were not only almost all black Southerners, but many lower-income white Southerners as well. Indeed, in Alabama more whites than blacks were purged from voter rolls. If successful, the efforts by contemporary Republican supporters of intimidating and complex “voter ID laws” will similarly reduce the political power of lower-income white voters, as well as black and Latino citizens.

This has generally been seen as a sword against Democrats, but the primary election used a new voter ID law, thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision invalidating the Voting Rights Act requirement for federal approval in advance of changes in the voting laws of Mississippi and nine other states, mostly in the South.

While rigging electoral rules to ensure that affluent and rich whites are over-represented in the electorate, Southern political elites have also sought to co-opt the white masses by means that did not threaten their own economic and social power. Generations of well-educated and genteel Southern politicians representing the rich and business interests have found it costs little (other than their dignity, perhaps) to champion populist social and cultural obsessions, from white supremacy and prohibition and anticommunism in the past to opposition to gay rights and abortion today.